Mornings when I meditatedI was presented with a nude glimpse of my lone soul,not the complex mysteries of love and hate.

But the Nudes are still as clear in my mindas pieces of laundry that froze on the clothesline overnight. There were in all thirteen of them.

Nude #2. Woman caught in a cage of thorns.Big glistening brown thorns with black stains on them where she twists this way and that way

unable to stand upright.Nude #3. Woman with a single great thorn implanted in her forehead.She grips it in both hands

endeavouring to wrench it out.Nude #4. Woman on a blasted landscape backlit in red like Hieronymus Bosch.

Covering her head and upper body is a hellish contraption like the top half of a crab.With arms crossed as if pulling off a sweater

she works hard at dislodging the crab. It was about this time I began telling Dr. Haw

about the Nudes. She said,When you see these horrible images why do you stay with them? Why keep watching? Why not

go away? I was amazed. Go away where? I said.This still seems to me a good question.

But by now the day is wide open and a strange young April light is filling the moor with gold milk. I have reached the middle

where the ground goes down into a depression and fills with swampy water.It is frozen.A solid black pane of moor life caught in its own night attitudes.

Certain wild gold arrangements of weed are visible deep in the black. Four naked alder trunks rise straight up from it and sway in the blue air. Each trunk

where it enters the ice radiates a map of silver pressures—thousands of hair-thin cracks catching the white of the light like a jailed face

catching grins through the bars.Emily Brontë has a poem about a woman in jail who says

A messenger of Hope, comes every night to me And offers, for short life, eternal Liberty.

I wonder what kind of Liberty this is.Her critics and commentators say she means death or a visionary experience that prefigures death.

They understand her prisonas the limitations placed on a clergyman’s daughterby nineteenth-century life in a remote parish on a cold moor

in the north of England.They grow impatient with the extreme terms in which she figures prison life.“In so much of Brontë’s work

the self-dramatising and posturing of these poems teeters on the brink of a potentially bathetic melodrama,” says one. Another

refers to “the cardboard sublime” of her caught world. I stopped telling my psychotherapist about the Nudes when I realized I had no way to answer her question,

Why keep watching?Some people watch, that’s all I can say. There is nowhere else to go,

no ledge to climb up to.Perhaps I can explain this to her if I wait for the right moment, as with a very difficult sister.

“On that mind time and experience alone could work: to the influence of other intellects it was not amenable,” wrote Charlotte of Emily.

I wonder what kind of conversation these two had over breakfast at the parsonage. “My sister Emily

was not a person of demonstrative character,” Charlotte emphasizes, “nor one on the recesses of whose mind and feelings, even those nearest and dearest to her could,

with impunity, intrude unlicensed. . . .” Recesses were many. One autumn day in 1845 Charlotte“accidentally lighted on a MS. volume of verse in my sister Emily’s handwriting.”

It was a small (4 x 6) notebook with a dark red cover marked 6d.and contained 44 poems in Emily’s minute hand.

Charlotte had known Emily wrote verse but felt “more than surprise” at its quality.“Not at all like the poetry women generally write.”

Further surprise awaited Charlotte when she read Emily’s novel, not least for its foul language.She gently probes this recess

in her Editor’s Preface to Wuthering Heights.“A large class of readers, likewise, will suffer greatly from the introduction into the pages of this work

of words printed with all their letters,which it has become the custom to represent by the initial and final letter only—a blankline filling the interval.”

Well, there are different definitions of Liberty. Love is freedom, Law was fond of saying. I took this to be more a wish than a thought

and changed the subject.But blank lines do not say nothing. As Charlotte puts it,

“The practice of hinting by single letters those expletiveswith which profane and violent persons are wont to garnish their discourse,strikes me as a proceeding which,

however well meant, is weak and futile.I cannot tell what good it does—what feeling it spares—what horror it conceals.”

I turn my steps and begin walking back over the moor towards home and breakfast. It is a two-way traffic,

the language of the unsaid. My favourite pages of The Collected Works Of Emily Brontëare the notes at the back

recording small adjustments made by Charlotteto the text of Emily’s verse,which Charlotte edited for publication after Emily’s death.“Prison for strongest [in Emily’s hand] altered to lordly by Charlotte.”

HERO

I can tell by the way my mother chews her toast whether she had a good nightand is about to say a happy thingor not.

Not.She puts her toast down on the side of her plate.You know you can pull the drapes in that room, she begins.

This is a coded reference to one of our oldest arguments, from what I call The Rules Of Life series.My mother always closes her bedroom drapes tight before going to bed at night.

I open mine as wide as possible. I like to see everything, I say. What’s there to see?

Moon. Air. Sunrise.All that light on your face in the morning. Wakes you up. I like to wake up.

At this point the drapes argument has reached a delta and may advance along one of three channels.There is the What You Need Is A Good Night’s Sleep channel,

the Stubborn As Your Father channel and random channel.More toast? I interpose strongly, pushing back my chair.

in the cerebral cortex and in the hippocampus. There is no known cause or cure. Mother visits him by taxi once a week

for the last five years.Marriage is for better or for worse, she says, this is the worse.

So about an hour later we are in the taxishooting along empty country roads towards town. The April light is clear as an alarm.

As we pass them it gives a sudden sense of every object existing in space on its own shadow. I wish I could carry this clarity with me

into the hospital where distinctions tend to flatten and coalesce. I wish I had been nicer to him before he got crazy. These are my two wishes.

It is hard to find the beginning of dementia. I remember a night about ten years ago when I was talking to him on the telephone.

It was a Sunday night in winter.I heard his sentences filling up with fear.He would start a sentence—about weather, lose his way, start another.It made me furious to hear him floundering—

my tall proud father, former World War II navigator! It made me merciless.I stood on the edge of the conversation,

watching him thrash about for cues, offering none,and it came to me like a slow avalanche

that he had no idea who he was talking to. Much colder today I guess. . . .his voice pressed into the silence and broke off,

snow falling on it.There was a long pause while snow covered us both. Well I won’t keep you,

he said with sudden desperate cheer as if sighting land. I’ll say goodnight now,I won’t run up your bill. Goodbye.

Goodbye.Goodbye. Who are you? I said into the dial tone.

At the hospital we pass down long pink halls through a door with a big window and a combination lock (5—25—3)

to the west wing, for chronic care patients. Each wing has a name. The chronic wing is Our Golden Mile

although mother prefers to call it The Last Lap. Father sits strapped in a chair which is tied to the wall in a room of other tied people tilting at various angles.

My father tilts least, I am proud of him. Hi Dad how y’doing?His face cracks open it could be a grin or rage

and looking past me he issues a stream of vehemence at the air. My mother lays her hand on his. Hello love, she says. He jerks his hand away. We sit.

Sunlight flocks through the room.Mother begins to unpack from her handbag the things she has brought for him,grapes, arrowroot biscuits, humbugs.

He is addressing strenuous remarks to someone in the air between us. He uses a language known only to himself, made of snarls and syllables and sudden wild appeals.

Once in a while some old formula floats up through the wash—You don’t say! or Happy birthday to you!—but no real sentence

for more than three years now.I notice his front teeth are getting black.I wonder how you clean the teeth of mad people.

He always took good care of his teeth. My mother looks up. She and I often think two halves of one thought. Do you remember that gold-plated toothpick

you sent him from Harrod’s the summer you were in London? she asks.Yes I wonder what happened to it.Must be in the bathroom somewhere.

She is giving him grapes one by one.They keep rolling out of his huge stiff fingers.He used to be a big man, over six feet tall and strong,

but since he came to hospital his body has shrunk to the merest bone house—except the hands. The hands keep growing.Each one now as big as a boot in Van Gogh,

they go lumbering after the grapes in his lap.But now he turns to me with a rush of urgent syllables that break off on a high note—he waits,

staring into my face. That quizzical look. One eyebrow at an angle.I have a photograph taped to my fridge at home.

It shows his World War II air crew posing in front of the plane. Hands firmly behind backs, legs wide apart, chins forward.

Dressed in the puffed flying suitswith a wide leather strap pulled tight through the crotch. They squint into the brilliant winter sun of 1942.

It is dawn.They are leaving Dover for France.My father on the far left is the tallest airman,

with his collar up,one eyebrow at an angle.The shadowless light makes him look immortal,

for all the world like someone who will not weep again. He is still staring into my face.Flaps down! I cry.His black grin flares once and goes out like a match.

HOT

Hot blue moonlight down the steep sky.I wake too fast from a cellar of hanged puppies with my eyes pouring into the dark.Fumbling

and slowlyconsciousness replaces the bars. Dreamtails and angry liquids

swim back down to the middle of me.I t is generally anger dreams that occupy my nights now. This is not uncommon after loss of love—

blue and black and red blasting the crater open. I am interested in anger. I clamber along to find the source.

My dream was of an old woman lying awake in bed.She controls the house by a system of light bulbs strung above her on wires.Each wire has a little black switch.

One by one the switches refuse to turn the bulbs on. She keeps switching and switching in rising tides of very hot anger.

Then she creeps out of bed to peer through lattices at the rooms of the rest of the house. The rooms are silent and brilliantly lit

and full of huge furniture beneath which crouch small creatures—not quite cats not quite rats licking their narrow red jaws

under a load of time.I want to be beautiful again, she whispers but the great overlit rooms tick emptily

as a deserted oceanliner and now behind her in the dark a rustling sound, comes—My pajamas are soaked.

Anger travels through me, pushes aside everything else in my heart, pouring up the vents.Every night I wake to this anger,

the soaked bed,the hot pain box slamming me each way I move. I want justice. Slam.

I want an explanation. Slam.I want to curse the false friend who said I love you forever. Slam. I reach up and switch on the bedside lamp. Night springs

out the window and is gone over the moor. I lie listening to the light vibrate in my ears and thinking about curses.

Emily Brontë was good at cursing.Falsity and bad love and the deadly pain of alteration are constant topics in her verse.

Well, thou halt paid me back my love! But if there be a God above Whose arm is strong, whose word is true, This hell shall wring thy spirit too!

The curses are elaborate:

There go, Deceiver, go! My hand is streaming wet; My heart’s blood flows to buy the blessing—To forget! Oh could that lost heart give back, back again to thine, One tenth part of the pain that clouds my dark decline!